THE EDITOR, Sir:
I WOULD like to draw your attention to an editorial in the New York Daily News dated today March 3, 2004. Under the headlines ARISTIDE: BETTER OFF ALIVE. It goes on "The people fuming that President Bush engineered the overthrow of Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide are pretty much the same people who cheerfully would have charged Dubya with imperialistic meddling had he sent in the Marines a week ago. The White House should pay little attention to them, or indeed to Aristide himself away in his safe haven.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that Aristide did in fact get hustled aboard a plane at the point of American guns. He should only thank his lucky stars. Else he would be chuck roast today. There was, flatly, no salvaging the man's untenable presidency.
Aristide saw to that himself, brushing off every diplomatic initiative for political settlements and insisting upon running his country into the ground his way. All his Caribbean neighbours were fed up to here with him. Haiti is measurably better off with him gone.
So the ever-malevolent United States turned its back on democracy, did it? Still another issue du jour for the Bush-bashers, though it does overlook the fact that it was France that spearheaded the demand for Aristide's resignation. Even the U.N. isn't interested in calls for a full-scale probe into the circumstances of his departure.
What's important is that in Port-au-Prince this day, the airport is secured, the streets are stabilising, the chimeres are melting away, an interim presidency is in place and the U.N. programs are in development. Whatever the Bush administration did or did not do, the result is for the moment at least, unlamentable."
WOW! What did Prime Minister Patterson say, a bad precedent indeed. Let's hear it for the USA, bastion of democracy.
I am, etc.,
K. CORBIN
bkrealty9@aol.com
Brooklyn, NY
Via Go-Jamaica
